Six-week online course taught via Zoom

Thursdays, December 19, 2024 - January 23, 2025
7:00 pm -8:30 pm ET (New York time)
$175 Paid Patreon Members / $195 General Admission

PLEASE NOTE: All classes will also be recorded and archived for students who cannot make that time

This six week class will explore the mythologies of the underworld, from Mesopotamia to Egypt, Greece, and Rome, with an eye towards the archetypal elements of the deep psyche activated by the descent. We will learn about the foundational mythologies of the journey to the underworld, investigating why they changed from one period to the next, and how that reflects the changing intellectual, spiritual, psychological, and social issues of these periods.

Our reading and discussion will begin with a focus on the archetypal imagery of the underworld. Specifically, we will focus on necrotypes: universal images of the human imagination evoked by the myth of the descent to the underworld (the nekyia). Finally, we will address the syncretic aspect of the mythologies of the underworld, which typically bring together motifs from a wide range of mythologies and spiritual traditions, with a special focus on motifs from Egyptian, Sumero-Babylonian, Greco-Roman, and Biblical narratives.

Richly illustrated lectures will draw from the instructor’s travels with Joseph Campbell in Egypt and Kenya. Topics covered will include Megalithic tomb burials, The Egyptian Books of the Dead, Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” and they myths of the descent of Inanna, Orpheus and Eurydice, Cupid and Psyche, and Jason and Medea.

Evans Lansing Smith is Core Faculty of the Mythological Studies Program at the Pacifica Graduate Institute. He has lectured widely and published ten books on comparative literature and mythology. In the 1970s he traveled with Joseph Campbell on study tours of France, Egypt, and Kenya.

Images: Souls on the Banks of the Acheron, Adolf Hirémy-Hirschl, 1898; Orpheus And Eurydice, Edward John Poynter, 1862